Reddit reviews Shadow Wars: The Secret Struggle for the Middle East

Yes.

The best source I've read is British professor Christopher Davidson's new book Shadow Wars. His area of expertise is on the Gulf monarchies and he has several previous books on them. Would advise reading that for an exhaustive look at the financing of ISIS and Nusra.

Behind closed doors its certainly the view of many leaders in DC.

Hillary Clinton's email leak was overshadowed by the election, but on foreign policy, she spoke about Saudi financing of ISIS in an email to Podesta.

> we need to use our diplomatic and more traditional intelligence assets to bring pressure on the governments of Qatar and Saudi Arabia, which are providing clandestine financial and logistic support to ISIL and other radical Sunni groups in the region.

Joe Biden speaking at Harvard's JFK School of Government was forced to apologise after saying he spoke with Erdogan privately about Turkey and "other allies" funding Nusra and ISIS.

> The vice president apologized for any implication that Turkey or other allies and partners in the region had intentionally supplied or facilitated the growth of ISIL or other violent extremists in Syria,

Steve Clemons, a great journalist reported that Bandar Bin Sultan, was fired in 2014 from the Syrian portfolio for being responsible for the rise of ISIS.

He also includes an interesting quote from a Qatari official who said:

> Qatar’s military and economic largesse has made its way to Jabhat al-Nusra, to the point that a senior Qatari official told me he can identify al-Nusra commanders by the blocks they control in various Syrian cities. But ISIS is another matter. As one senior Qatari official stated, “ISIS has been a Saudi project.”

But all this goes way further back. During the US occupation of Iraq and the Iraq insugency, Nir Rosen in his book Aftermath wrote that the Iraq insurgency was largely paid for by the Saudi Association of Muslim Scholars from a large mosque outside Baghdad.

Also of course in New York the current 9/11 lawsuit seems to have complied enough evidence to bring a lawsuit against the Saudi government directly. We wait to see what that reveals.

What are you rambling about? If someone doesn't follow the Marxist method, why would they call themselves Marxist?

His views on the migration issue lacks any strong anti imperialist analysis. Saying Europe is "partially responsible" for the refugee crisis ignores the origins of the problems in the Middle East region. Those Gulf nations and fundamentalist Islam are the creations of the UK and the US. Sykes-Picot was a European thing. Balfour declaration is a European thing. The UK and the US bank rolling terrorism is a thing .All of that is well documented.

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Another aspect is ignoring how the global economic system is made to transfer value and profit from the global south to the global north.

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Finally I haven't seen him linking imperialism and the very obvious xenophobia gripping the West. This is something Marx, Lenin, etc... have talked about, but western "marxists" like Zizek downplay it or even deny it. Leave it to clowns like him to make marxism xenophobic

A dogma is denying another point of view just because it's different from the conventional one, but there is plenty of evidence that the conventional method is still correct while the views spread by him are nonsense.

For anyone interested in the book: https://www.amazon.com/Shadow-Wars-Secret-Struggle-Middle/dp/1786070014